Connect  Knife  Reprieve  Faith
by ilurandir
Summary: Minerva and Severus find a kind of solace - snatched hours - pulling hope from the wreckage that the Second War has already begun to bring.


At sixteen she told him that he would never be like his father - something which Severus Snape had been desperate to hear. She expected to never see him again. Severus struck her as the kind of boy who would leave everything he could behind. Not that he had much left.

Oh yes, she knew. He had come to work as Potions Master at Hogwarts just a few months ago, in January. Barely twenty and already broken and so, so sad. And, she felt, much too young to be teaching. Much too young to have seen everything he'd seen… don't everything he'd done. But then, weren't they all?

When she stopped seeing him at dinner she questioned Dumbledore - she knew he was a double agent - although the others didn't. She knew that the reason he was absent on weekends was because he was off… 'proving himslf' as Albus had put it, to the Dark Lord to whom, it was said (and if Dumbledore said it, she believed it) he was no longer even marginally faithful to.

And yet, from the great hall she thought she saw that dark, sloping figure slip past the double doors. It possessed her suddenly. She filled a bowl with stew - dark and rich against the eggshell blue of the china.

She didn't have to follow the little pools of water to know he was headed for his offices in the dungeons. So dark and dreary down there - barely a broom closet (Professor Slughorn had been right), but Severus hadn't complained, even though there were plenty of rooms in the sunny third floor that would be just find for an office.

She had to knock several times, but Minerva McGonagall was not a woman that ever gave up easily. When he wrenched the door open - for it stuck a little - his hair was still soaked, as were his robes. He looked pale, shaken… and it chilled her to think that he had been - just a little while ago - with Lord Voldemort. She imagined she could smell that odour of dead things - earthy but… but somehow much more unpleasant. Fetid, a stagnant smell, like standing water.

"You, Severus Snape," she said, holding a bowl of stew, "need to start eating properly, or you'll never be able to teach." She'd stood there in his doorway, still as steel, with her sternest expression, until that vaguely nonplussed expression left his dark eyes and he took the bowl from her hands and let her in, wordlessly.

He was polite in an awkward way. He'd offered her tea, speaking in monosyllables, and they sat on either end of the little wooden table he used as a desk. She watched him stir his stew with a spoon, round and round, and when the silence had stretched out too long, something in him broke - she sensed it in the air around him rather than saw it - and he said, down to his bowl, "Everyone keeps dying."

She'd looked at him sharply, to reprimand him for talking that way - that was no way to think while they were in the middle of a war. Defeatist thinking wouldn't solve anything. She was startled to see tears slide off the end of his nose.

"Oh, now," she said, putting her cup down and getting up and touching his shoulder, then his hair, trying to provide some measure of comfort.

He had, of course, just lost Lily Potter not three months ago. She'd seen the two of them, when they were students, how close they were. The only time she'd ever seen Severus laugh was with that girl. Trust Miss Evans to bring out the best in everyone.

And then of course, there had been Regulus Black. She would catch them sometimes when they were still in school, dark heads bent close - too close perhaps… she didn't miss they way they would look at each other, when they thought no one else was watching.

And then, Regulus was killed, too. He'd been too young, too eager to please - hadn't know the horrors into which he was ensnaring himself.

The man sitting before her now slowly calmed. His shoulders stopped twitching with the effort of holding in those sobs.

He turned his face into her palm, pulling in a breath as though to speak, but he didn't. Instead, he froze up. Perhaps he was startled that she didn't pull away, as one normally might have done as such an accidental intimacy. Instead, she stroked a prominent cheekbone with her thumb. He didn't have the high cheeks of pure-blood royalty, no. Never that. He looked more starved than anything.

"You should eat that stew, you'll feel better," she said, and suddenly he was standing before her, with a vague clatter of his spoon, looking down at her with those eyes - so stark against his pallor. When, she wondered, had he gotten so tall?

Childishly, he broke that impressive stillness and wiped the tears from his cheeks, sniffed and looked away, his breath coming a little faster than normal.

"Perhaps you should leave," he said quietly. "Thank you for the stew."

"Will you be all right?" she asked.

"You've always been kind to me," he said, looking back at her with a kind of sharp confusion. She'd seen that look before, whenever she'd been… perhaps, yes, a little too kind to him in school. Like he didn't want her pity.

It wasn't pity. Not really.

"For some reason I seem to have taken a bit of a shine to you," she said, teasing a little, and then he kissed her, a little hiccup of a sob - or perhaps simply startled at his own actions - against her mouth.

She pulled back just a little, but her hand fell to his hip and stopped him moving away. She felt the tension in his body melt, just a little. He was standing so still, his face angled away, but his eyes still fixed on her - waiting - calculating just how much trouble he was in. Another look she was familiar with.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I was upset." As though he wasn't still.

"Well," she managed, meeting his eyes. He flinched a little, as though to look away, but there was no mistaking the intent there. How many times, she wondered, had this man been turned down - turned away? He'd always been old before his time - he'd always punished himself, quietly, inadvertently. She'd noticed not even two years ago, when he was still her student.

Well, he wasn't her student anymore, was he? He was twenty-some years younger than her, but he wasn't her student. And there was something, she had to admit, about Severus Snape that was intriguing. His mystery, yes - how private he was, but also this vulnerable side she had seen less than a handful of times, but recently… Severus was living on the edge of a knife - between this side and the other… she'd seen the worry, the fear in his eyes, when he thought that everyone had looked away.

She felt him begin to move away, and reached up quickly and touched his cheek. He stilled. "Patience," she whispered, before kissing him quickly. He'd looked a little outraged at the reprimand. As though he didn't understand patience.

He pulled back after a few moments, meeting her eyes, searching, his own flickering back and forth between hers, then slowly, tentatively, leaned down and kissed her neck, just below her ear, then down her throat to the collar of her robes. Perhaps she'd forgotten that twenty wasn't still so very young. Perhaps she'd forgotten the things he might have known, and done.

Certainly he had learned enough with Regulus Black. Oh yes, she'd seen them - standing so close in corridors, dangerously close to pushing the line of After Hours. It wasn't like her, but she'd never said a thing. Both those boys, they'd always seemed so lonely.

She could feel him trembling - lack of sleep, lack of nutrition, and stress certainly. "Let's sit down," she said, nodding - bold as brass, he thought - towards the bed.

Things happened quickly after that, and he made her feel young again, the way he watched her undress, with no care to his own undressing. He shrugged out of his robes quicker than she could push them from his shoulders, and yet while she undid the buttons of her collar he only watched her. His eyes were hungry, but not only lustful - he was hungry for contact, someone else's hands on his body - the smell of someone pressed so close. Almost before she knew it, they were under the sheets, and heat was radiating off him so that his thin frame felt almost feverish.

They both knew it wasn't a good idea, but they had also wordlessly accepted that it was going to happen, and damn all the rest. It wasn't going to be labelled, she could see, as a 'mistake' in the future. The way he held her eyes, the way his long hand cradled the side of her face as he entered her, so close, his face buried in the pillow under her head.

For the rest of her life, one of the most erotic things she would ever experience would be Severus's slow loss of control. He was so silent, almost regimented at first, and then his hips pumped into her faster - both of them a little too thin - their bruising lightly over their bones with the force of his thrusts which had been, at first, so long and slow and now were short little jerks. The way his hands clutched at the pillow under them, the strain in his arms as he rocked against her.

The noises he made, soft sounds in his throat, almost gasps were what started it - that tension in her belly, the heat between her thighs. (_Minerva_, her mother had once said _Wear a longer dress, who will ever want you with those skinny legs_? But they'd laughed - it had been a little scandalous in the minister's house.)

It was funny. She'd gone into this offering comfort, wanting the outcome, of course - wanting to be in bed with someone… but she hadn't expected to find herself so on the brink- she'd offered herself to him to lose himself in - to be his comfort, his protector, her arms wrapped around the heat of his back while he lost his sadness for a while…

And yet here she was, suddenly, arching into him- the way he sounded so desperate, those stifled moans low in his long throat- it made her feel beautiful. He pulled himself up suddenly, catching the backs of her thighs in his hands, her feet still flat on the mattress, the better to meet his thrusts, and he looked at her, his cheeks flushed, and that long, long black hair wild about his face. He let go of her legs and touched her belly softly, ran his hands up her slender sides, caressed the side of her breast, her throat. He touched her hair where it was coming loose from its bun, then his head dropped to his chest and he cried out, then cursed softly, slowing down with such suddenness that she knew he was trying to hold on. She gave him a moment, but only a moment. She herself had been on the very edge. Shushing him, without really knowing why, she shifted, forcing him to follow, so that her legs were pressed tight together between his, and when she reached down, she could feel the tightness of him, slid her fingers very gently against the soft skin between his bollocks and he groaned and said "Ah fuck," and gently, she pulled him down against her, her thighs squeezed together. Whimpering he found her mouth, kissed her messily, and she complied.

She slid her tongue against his once and he came, so sudden and fast it surprised both of them, and he was whispering, "OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod," and his hands were holding her shoulders so tightly, almost cradling her to him, and she came, tightening around him, pulling him deeper, until they were left spent and panting.

She lay there quite a while - both of them drifting in and out of sleep, strangely comfortable in this silence. His hand touched her waist tentatively, just the backs of those long fingers - they smelled of nicotine. Still smoking, was he? A filthy Muggle habit which she'd reprimanded him for more than once. When she didn't protest the whispers of his fingers, he rested his arm over her, just under her ribs - a solid assurance of her presence… and it was a strange, easy comfort she'd never seen in him before… unless you counted the way he would reach out and touch Regulus's arm and once, in the library, the nape of his neck. And she'd seen it in the way he'd only ever looked at Lily Evans.

When she finally did get up to leave, he sat up and watched her dress, hands handling between his knees, almost, it seemed, unaware or uncaring of his own nudity. She fixed her hair and then she leant down and kissed him, both their mouths open, relaxed. He bit down on her lip though, as she pulled away, and she caught a flash of a grin, pleased by his own daring, and that he'd gotten away with it. Cheeky bastard.

They both knew why she was leaving - because this wasn't something to be wondered about by the other professors, or even by the more observant students. Because neither wanted more from this than what it was. They both shouldered too much responsibility. A relationship was something neither desired from the other at the moment. And besides, tomorrow was Monday, and classes were still rowdy, so soon after the Christmas Holiday.

"Thank you," she heard him say as she reached the door. She turned back and smiled at him. "You're very welcome," she said.

It was a rare occurrence, but in the sixteen years that they worked together, they would find refuge in each other's arms and beds several times, often years apart.

The year Umbridge came they found themselves together more, spending the night a little too often. Near the end, it became almost a real relationship. Always hidden, of course, always kept quiet - not because they wanted it to be a secret, but because they were private people.

And it had been strangely comfortable, those stolen mornings - Saturdays and Sundays usually - a Professor's life. She would watch him read the Prophet from the bed, and he had,- just once or twice- stood behind her after she had tied up her hair, leaning into her ever so slightly, her arms over his arms, around her waist, with his lips pressed gently against her neck, just breathing.

She couldn't see his face, then, and he knew that. She knew things were hard- that Voldemort was stronger, cleverer this time 'round. "Sometimes I feel like I'm losing control," he whispered to her, one night in the dark - taking the chance she would still be awake.

"Have faith, Severus," she had said.

He wished he'd had a chance to tell her that he wasn't truly defecting Dumbledore's side.

He hoped she would forgive him.


End file.
